Guidance for Newbie

[dfrecore]

If you haven't read the Beginner's Guide, that's a good place to start. Reading this forum at least an hour a day for several weeks is good too.  Read every new post, and any that interest you, read all the way from the beginning.  That will help you to understand what's going on here.

Finally, you need to figure out the way that you learn best.  ALEKS can be good, if you are good at math, or a visual learner - but really slow if you aren't.  SL is also good for visual learners, and they have open-book final exams.  I found them quite tedious, but everyone is different.  Study.com and Sophia are good if you like video-based learning.  Study.com has a lot of quizzes, but I find the learning style there works for me personally (although I don't do the videos, I have gotten used to the small pieces of info that I can digest to be helpful in my old age!   ).

There are a lot of choices, lots of courses in the $100/course price, lots of free courses, lots of tests, lots of everything - it all just depends on what works for you in terms of learning style, price that you want to pay, speed at which you learn, distance to a testing center, etc.